


sorbet

by tnevmucric



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Metaverse (Persona 5), Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Minor Violence, Recreational Drug Use, Secret Relationship, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25765570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnevmucric/pseuds/tnevmucric
Summary: things which don’t last
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro & Persona 5 Protagonist, Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	sorbet

Ren had been a picky eater, back then. 

His mouth had flooded with sweetness, with saliva, and he gagged. It was similar to nausea. An uncertain tightness grew in his throat and later, he’d compare it to the first time he ever gave a blowjob.

When Ren thinks, he realises how well they’d known each other then in that short night. When Goro landed a blow to his ribs:  _you too?_ When Ren elbowed his head to the ground:  _me too._ Sometimes all it takes is a look, a fleeting touch to know, but for them it was loose teeth and swelling jaws and two bouncers pulling them apart like kittens by the scruffs of their necks. A smear of gold paint climbed Goro’s face and blood dripped from his nose, staining his shirt red. Ren was considering the cut in his eyebrow when Goro spat blood onto his shoes, reinvigorating the fight.

So: a man fights another man half a block from a nondescript gay bar in one of the many back alleys of Shinjuku. Ren supposes, in their own way, it could have been a first date.

* * *

“Am I your secret?”

“I thought I was yours.”

He turns to tuck his face against Ren’s neck. A quiet movement sealed with a kiss. There is no cinematic moonlight to cut into his skin. There is the dark, and their wet breathing, and their shared pillow, and their bodies laying  _ sidebyside _ .

* * *

What it felt like to be up so early with the gold breeze biting your skin and the subtle warmth of a cigarette on your fingertip: frostbite. Ren shoves his fingers in his hair tiredly, closing his eyes, jostling his glasses—

Goro liked cold weather, he said it made it easier work.

Ren felt insatiable. He wanted to salt every root Goro Akechi had dug in, he wanted to burn blooms, he wanted to cultivate and curate and—

The cold didn’t make it easier to think.

* * *

Some nights, Ren feels slick with the sweat of insomnia on his tongue. He’s ice cold. No one will touch him, no one will talk to him. Some nights he wants to pump everything out of his body and fill it with wet wipes and antiseptic and orange-flavoured cough syrup. 

Ren thinks: I am the light overhead. I am the squeaky wheels of a gurney passing by. I am drugs counteracting drugs in my nervous system. I am mourning me. I am in the waiting room, asking every nurse that passes by what my condition could be. I am oxygen being forced into my lungs, I am not breathing.

I am my little finger, twitching.

(Goro will touch him. Goro will talk to him.)

* * *

Goro breathed so deeply and slowly as he slept, warm exhales that fanned out across the pillow. When awake, it was almost the same. He was content enough to listen to Ren’s early morning ramblings, blinking slowly as his mind sluggishly pulled itself together. Ren was confident that Goro listened, though; he was confident that he wasn’t just background chatter. Goro’s eyes were soft, and his hand would reach up periodically to push Ren’s fringe away from his forehead or to flick a stray eyelash away. 

And Ren... Ren liked mornings the most.

* * *

Some nights Goro lingers, and Ren catches him watching with something he can’t name.

“What?”, Ren’ll ask.

“You should try to sleep”, he’ll say.

“I do try”, Ren’ll insist.

“Maybe you need to try harder”, he’ll frown.

The room tonight is on a high enough floor that when you look down at the concrete below you can easily imagine what it would be like to plummet. Vertigo. The sky is black, everything outside is a void. This is Sunday’s muted ransom—your life and nothing else, the world will take.

Back on the street Ren saw construction and deconstruction. The day had felt bright and new but inside he still felt anxiety. He felt an itch. He wanted to push the sky and the ground away and just levitate in some sort of cloying silence where he might figure out—

The shower shuts off.

The champagne has grown warm and the bedsheets are disheveled from where Ren had laid waiting. He sits there now as Goro drags the short table by the window over, a muted shift of a sound that reminds Ren of tired feet. There’s a disjointedness here that makes him question whether he’s still high from last night. The darkness outside, the swimming feeling in his body... Goro’s hair is loose and tangled as he leans over to rummage through his jacket pockets. The long, bare line of his back, the hum as he shakes a small bag of coke and Ren—Ren wants.

It’s a warm kind of burn, going in.

Goro mouths against his throat.

“How does it feel?”

He smells sun-warmed from his shower. Shampoo clings to his hair and there’s a sheen on his cheeks.

“Hot.”  
  


* * *

Ren does go home eventually.

Ren’s phone does ring.

“I’m still in our bed. I’m on your side.”

Ren leans his head against the fridge and counts to ten.  _ If it’s still warm _ , a postcard reads, stuck to the stainless steel with a palm tree magnet,  _ and if it still breathes, then it’s a lot like home. _

In the shower, he squeezed the back of his own neck, cooling his face against the shower tile. He squeezed again, his hand trailing lower. He squeezed again, imagining Goro with him.

* * *

“Would you miss me if I left, Ren?”

“Are you planning on leaving?”

“I could say something smart now.”

“Are you going to?”

“No. And no, I’m not leaving. Not anytime soon.”

Ren thinks: Maybe I’m like wet concrete. Not dry-wet concrete, but concrete that has yet to be cooked by the sun and by children’s fingers and dogs footprints. I’m soaking in everything he’s giving me and I am a reminder of the countdown between us. But I want to be wet forever. I want to drench the bed with that he gives me. I want slashes of rain against my never-settling skin, so he might remake the marks that remind us both of how I am his.

And Ren thinks: I would miss him if he were gone. I miss him even when he is with me.

* * *

Their veins are still throbbing from the cocaine. Their thighs are still twitching with the aftershocks of the afterglow. Goro’s hand trembles, slipping against Ren’s side.

Ren remembers what it was like to have that hand in his hair.

He presses his thumb against the indentation of his teeth on Goro’s jaw. Here is where we tangled, he thinks. Our tangible trail around Tokyo that smeared the gold paint on your cheek and left a stain on my fist—here, Goro, is where we began. 

Ren says this, and Goro just smiles leisurely.

“I know that’s not what you really think.”

But Ren thinks it is. Because this is how Ren loves him.

* * *

Goro says: Ren.

Ren, you need to deal with the reality of the situation.

Ren.

Ren listen to me.

Ren.

Ren.

Ren.

If I scream out enough maybe the echoes will reach you.

Ren.

Ren. 

Listen to me.

—and Ren misses living. Ren misses loving and he misses breathing and he misses Goro the same way he misses missing teeth. But Ren is so young.

Goro will come back.

* * *

Goro corners him against the wall, his knuckles solid against Ren’s chest. The neon light from overhead bulb paints them red and Ren, Ren thinks: stop. Ren thinks: raspberries. Ren thinks: maybe love is not enough. You’re the wrong shape, the wrong size, you’re the wrong colour and nothing fits anymore. You try and you try and love really must not be enough, because as much as you try you cannot love yourself, and you cannot fall in love, and some days it is so hard to even love your friends. If love was enough love would be easy. 

Ren thinks: Love is not enough. 

Goro smiles with red teeth, his chest shuddering in time with the bass vibrating the roof of the club. His knuckles are still harsh against Ren’s chest. Goro is infantile steel—

Goro will bend, Goro will break.

Goro will leave a taste in your mouth you’ll want to spit out, a metal stink on your skin that follows you home.

He shoves Ren again, hard, but doesn’t let go.

Ren can taste him. Ren can smell him.

“Fucking hit me”, he demands.

Inertia. Goro is quiet and Goro is fierce and while Goro’s smiling he’s building energy. Building, building, building energy. Under his gloves he’s trembling, there’s that much. Inertia—

Goro kisses him hard against the wall, his fingers dragging to pull on Ren’s jacket. Ren thinks of months ago, sitting with Futaba on her bed and staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars. He tried to explain it to her then, to describe in words that made sense what it was like to have Goro want him. 

Goro looks straight at him, sometimes, and it takes Ren right back to that alley, with his blood on his shirt and his spit on his shoes, where there’s a gold smear on Goro’s cheek and a matching skid on Ren’s knuckles. Where they’re both too young and stupid to make sense of anything.

Ren thinks that maybe they could be pit stops for each other until they find someone else to fall in love with, and if they aren’t he thinks they could have enough time to figure that out. There’s time to grow grossly close and time to learn what it’s like to settle in routine, to straighten each other’s collars and to take turns making tea...

To fall in love, and to keep falling. Because it’s enough for now.

(And bathroom stalls are cold. And the heat from the spacey, fluorescent lights above makes Ren feel like he’s in an interrogation with himself as Goro pushes him against the sink and struggles with his belt.)

Goro says; Relax.

It’s just me.

It’s just you.

Ren thinks he might say; Please kiss me again. 

(And the thud of the club continues on outside, a yellow-magic synth-pop kind of song heating up the summer night.)

(And Goro kisses him again.)

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading!
> 
> — tnevmucric.carrd.co


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